Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 29, 1999

A young schizophrenic attacks an innocent boy, and then is seen covering up a shallow grave. At home, his father abuses his pregnant sister and gymnast brother. Before the film is over, we'll meet a blind ice skater, an armless man who plays cards with his feet and a magician who swallows lit cigarettes.

"Julien donkey-boy," opening today at the Lumiere, is the latest freak show from Harmony Korine, the young filmmaker who wrote the remarkable "Kids" and then turned director with "Gummo." If the latter film pushed our tolerance with disturbing images and crude filmmaking, then "julien donkey-boy" is determined to push that anti-aesthetic ever further.

This is the kind of film that looks great on paper -- and provides the director with an opportunity to noodle and experiment and feel satisfied that he's created something on his own terms, in defiance of professional models.

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That's great for a developing artist -- Korine is in his mid-20s -- but the product in this case is a self-indulgent mess. Reacting against the plush aesthetics of Hollywood, Korine used handheld digital cameras to shoot "julien," shunned artificial light and instructed his actors to improvise scenes based on an outline of a script.

It's the same philosophy that Danish filmmakers Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier espoused in Dogme 95, their ridiculous manifesto that shuns the "bourgeois romanticism" and slick technique of commercial films. In fact, Von Trier phoned Korine when he heard about "julien" during pre-production and proposed that it become the first official Dogme production made in the United States.

Korine even used cinematographer Anthony Dod Mangle and editor Valdis Oskardottir, both of whom worked on Vinterberg's "The Celebration." Committed to the low-tech principles of Dogme 95, they forbade any post-production music or dialogue, and fiddled around by creating freeze frames and superimpositions inside the camera.

STOMACH-CHURNING

Part of their intention was to bring us inside the subjective experience of Julien, a character based on Korine's schizophrenic uncle and played with abandon by Scottish actor Ewen Bremner ("Trainspotting"). Again, the concept is fine, but in practice it's one of the ugliest films I've ever seen: a mass of dark and grainy images, with the same kind of wobbly camera moves that made "The Blair Witch Project" such a stomach-churner.

I have no problem with films that mix things up and experiment with film stock, color and wacky point-of- view camera angles. Oliver Stone and his cinematographer Robert Richardson did it in "Natural Born Killers," and Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai used those methods brilliantly in "Happy Together" to suggest the chaos in his characters' lives.

Korine, however, doesn't have the technical gifts of those artists. He knows what he doesn't want -- the glib cosmetics of Hollywood -- but he lacks the means or the imagination to find compelling alternatives.

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